Living Single
Six friends, two apartments, one Brooklyn brownstone — a year before Friends existed. Queen Latifah's magazine boss Khadijah, Kim Fields's diva Régine, Erika Alexander's razor-tongued lawyer Maxine, and the guys upstairs — the Brooklyn hangout sitcom that did it all first.
Living Single premiered on Fox on August 22, 1993, built by creator Yvette Lee Bowser — who set out to make a show about herself and her friends that would change how young Black people were portrayed on television. The setup: six twenty-somethings sharing a brownstone in Brooklyn's Prospect Heights, the women in one apartment and the men in another. Queen Latifah anchored it as Khadijah James, editor and publisher of the indie magazine Flavor, alongside Kim Coles as her sweet cousin-slash-receptionist Synclaire, Kim Fields as label-obsessed boutique buyer Régine, and Erika Alexander as attorney Maxine Shaw, whose flirt-fight sparring with stockbroker Kyle Barker (T.C. Carson) became the show's signature will-they-won't-they. John Henton's handyman Overton rounded out the house.
The show was an immediate hit for Fox — its first season out-rated Martin and made it the network's fourth highest-rated show — and it stayed in the top five among Black households for all five of its seasons and 118 episodes. Latifah herself sang the theme, and its opening line gave the era a catchphrase: in a nineties kind of world, I'm glad I got my girls.
Then, one year after Living Single debuted, NBC premiered Friends: six single pals, split apartments, a hangout couch. Critics noticed the resemblance — and noticed, too, that the show about Black professionals (a lawyer, a stockbroker, a business owner) never got the promotion or the magazine covers its NBC cousin did; Bowser said as much about how little Warner Bros. pushed her show compared to Friends. Living Single ended on January 1, 1998, but its stature has only grown: it reached streaming in 2018, a new generation found it, and it's now routinely cited as the blueprint for the decade's entire friends-as-family sitcom wave — the one that did it first.
Similar items
Friends
NBC's ten-season juggernaut turned Central Perk into a real place and gave six 20-something New Yorkers the kind of friendship every 90s kid wanted. Rachel's haircut, Monica's apartment, Ross and Rachel's will-they-won't-they, and that theme song — an inescapable cultural monument that redefined the sitcom.
Martin Lawrence
A shape-shifting comedy force. On Martin he played a Detroit radio DJ—and an entire neighborhood of other characters: Sheneneh, Mama Payne, Jerome, Dragonfly Jones. The show was one of Fox's highest-rated and made him a star; stand-up and movies (Bad Boys, Big Momma's House) carried the run into the 2000s.
The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
NBC's six-season hit brought hip-hop culture to mainstream network TV, launching Will Smith from music-industry crisis to acting stardom. A sitcom pitched by music manager Benny Medina about his own rags-to-riches story, it gave the world one of the most recited theme songs ever — and Alfonso Ribeiro's Carlton Dance defined a generation's pop-culture moves.
Arrested Development
A razor-sharp comedy about a wealthy, deeply dysfunctional real-estate family, canceled after just three seasons on Fox but too clever to fade. Low ratings, massive critical acclaim, and jokes that rewarded rewatching — there was always money in the banana stand. When Netflix revived it, the show's legacy finally caught up to its ambition.